That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases.

The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.

▲ thephyber 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

What do you mean “fair”? What happens in the years/decades between when this hypothetical system is enacted and when the US can train up sufficient workers to substitute the labor force we currently have with H1-B?

Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.

▲ throwawaymaths 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

exactly wrong. Americans are dissuaded from going into these highly skilled fields because anyone talented enough to do those things realizes they can make much more building SAASes or working on wall street.

the Boeingization of the economy is mbas and bean counter middle management realizing that an H1-B is much cheaper than a citizen and opting to buy that labor, even if it's worse quality. as management, you put an ass into a seat, so job accomplished, here's your accolade.

	▲	thephyber 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Your comment has a thin veneer of truth, but actually has very little to do with H1-B system. Boeing is full of bean counters now, but they are optimizing things like opening factories in poor non-unions states (the South Carolina factory has had lots of whistleblowers screaming about lack of training and pressure to build faster than is safe), convincing the FAA to let Boeing employees do regulatory review on their own company, etc. few or none of Boeing’s problems are solved by eliminating/reducing H1-Bs for that company/industry, which is why I chose them as the example. “Americans are dissuaded…” This has an emotional appeal to intuition, but I don’t think it’s what’s causing Americans not to compete for jobs/industries that heavily use H1-B. If it was, there would simply be a market competition and those programmer salaries would drop. Instead, I think Americans have been convinced by Theil types to avoid US universities (either for cultural reasons or ROI reasons). You seem to be making an argument that the ROI would be better if H1-Bs were scarce, but that wouldn’t change the fact that tuition in elite US institutions is expensive and seats are scarce+competitive. Without also changing either the university system to seat more students or companies to hire from different signals (instead of highly prizing the bland name of the university), American job applicants won’t be dissuaded from getting those degrees. Arguably H1-Bs have done the most damage to US programmers, but there are several other structural problems regarding programmer hiring in the US. The big tech collusion to reduce employee poaching (not current, but recent past), application process (“resume firewall”, ghost jobs, deluge of automated applications), the interview process (we seem to have optimized for gotcha questions and LeetCoding tests, rather than real world requirements), high interest rates (higher than the recent past) have squeezed VC funding and closed the wallets of employers, and the race to replace/augment salary employees with AI agents. All of these are structural problems that arguably do more dissuading than the visa system.

▲ Taek 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or... those other parts of the economy increase salaries for skilled labor?

If we can only bring 85,000 people into the country on one type of visa, doesn't it make sense to prioritize those that will bring the most value (tax revenue, in this case)?

And if that's not enough people... raise the limit? And be confident that a raised limit is still keeping a high quality bar on entrants?

▲

whatever1 4 days ago | parent [-]

Option 1: you give a visa to a quant with 2M/y today’s salary

Option 2: you give a visa to a PhD to work for 150k/year in a small biopharma startup that thinks it has the solution to cancer.

This salary stacked ranking optimizes for today’s worth of work. Not its potential.

	▲	4 days ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

▲ throwaway2037 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

    > hedge fund quants

Are there 85,000 new hedge fund quants that need to be hired each year? I guess it is more like 1,000. The number of people employed as quants at hedge funds is incredibly small.

▲ surfmike 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You could make multiple pools, having separate ones carved out for research and advanced technology.

A lot of H1Bs are not working on anything you described though.

▲ WillPostForFood 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research "

This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs.

Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero.

Amazon.Com Services

Cognizant Technology Solutions

Ernst & Young

Tata Consultancy Services

Google

Microsoft

Infosys

Meta Platforms

Intel

Hcl America

Amazon Web Services

IBM

Jpmorgan Chase

Walmart

Apple

Accenture

Capgemini

Ltimindtree

Deloitte Consulting

Salesforce

Qualcomm

Tesla

Amazon Development Center

Wipro

Fidelity Technology Group

Tech Mahindra

Compunnel Software Group

Deloitte Touche

Mphasis

Nvidia

Adobe

Bytedance

Goldman, Sachs

Cisco

Pricewaterhousecoopers Advisory Services

Paypal

Ebay

Servicenow

Visa USA

For non-slop jobs, give them a green card and fast track to citizenship. For an IT consultant, no thanks.

source: https://www.myvisajobs.com/reports/h1b/

▲

osnium123 4 days ago | parent [-]

Intel H1Bs are engaged in semiconductor research.

	▲	aydyn 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well it's Intel... not really selling your case here.
	▲	notmyjob 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Doubtful.

▲ BeFlatXIII 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.

If they're that necessary, let companies hire them on green card visas.

▲ AbrahamParangi 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is just an argument against allowing the market to set wages, which you could make if you wanted to but it is not a strong one.

▲ m-schuetz 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think it's that fair. IT jobs are exceptionally well paid and this system may starve other domains of talent, domains that don't have that kind of fuck-it money that IT has.

But I agree rhat H1B should not be about hiring cheap labour. I'd prefer a system where H1B salaries must be competitive with the top of the field. There are incredibly smart talents around the world, and if you hire someone from outside then it should be because they are the best of the best, so they should get paid accordingly.

▲ _heimdall 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can we really consider it the free market when there are already so many regulations in place?

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collingreen 4 days ago | parent [-]

I don't think the "free" in free market is supposed to mean no rules. I think the "free" is supposed to mean both sides of the transactions get to choose to participate or not which means they are pressured to "meet in the middle" and optimize for mutually beneficial deals. The idea is that this is going to provide better outcomes than trying to plan out what everyone makes and buys from the top.

Overregulation can reduce the effective freedom in a market (usually by increasing costs or reducing choice) but good regulation is there to shepherd this equilibrium of a fair deal between buyers and sellers by doing things like getting externalities priced in (if youre buying x you should pay the cost of x, not your neighbor); preventing monopolies, cartels, other price fixing / choice reducing things that makes one side of the market not have to meet in the middle; and adding standards or visibility so market participants can be more efficient and safe when choosing (instead of having to do things like research all of a company's supply chain and employees to decide if it's safe to eat there or to fly in their planes).

Some things get imposed onto the market intentionally like protection for unions (in theory an alternative/shortcut to grouping up into inefficient passthrough companies), tarrifs to give someone an advantage in what they can offer, subsidies to intentionally prevent the market from contracting to the current size of demand (like if the country wants to maintain a certain ability to produce food or doctors or certain goods), and government programs to effectively set a floor on the price of something (like interest rates so lending/borrowing will never be worse than a certain mark).

All these things are useful tools in a market of self motivated actors trying to maximize their own gain in the short term but, like all tools, they get abused and out maneuvered often so it's a constant game of cat and mouse to keep the system running.

Pros and cons all over the place; most things have a huge downside of vulnerability to truly bad actors having too much control (which is where the idea of democracy comes in but I have to stop myself I already word dumped).

tl;dr yes absolutely call it a free market until people are forced to participate too much

	▲	_heimdall 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I totally agree that there are two extremes to the idea and neither are realistic. A market doesn't have to be completely free of regulation to be considered free. There's a balance though, and as heavily regulated as immigration is I just don't see how it could fall into the range of being a roughly free market. Work-based immigration into the US specifically is heavily regulated and there are a lot of blocks in the way making it infeasible or impossible for one to take part in it. I mean that on both sides too, both employers and potential employees are heavily burdened by the process and often they just can't take part in the process for any number of regulatory reasons.

▲ cm2187 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes and no. That's going to benefit wall street, at the expense of R&D labs where PhD researchers are paid in whip lashes.

▲ 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]